OpenStack BugTriage day

Tomorrow, Thursday June 7th, the OpenStack community will run a BugTriage day. Why are we doing this ? What are we going to do ? How can you participate ?

Bug tracking is an essential part of our development processes. Well-maintained bug lists help us know the current state of our projects better, define bugfixing priorities, and identify milestone and release-critical issues.

The trick is, the bug lists can quickly get unusable if they are not well-maintained. Most of our core projects managed to keep their bug lists relevant and current, but the largest ones (Nova and Swift) allowed some pile-up in the recent months… and that creates a vicious circle: as the bug tracker becomes less relevant, bugs gets even less attention, and things get worse.

BugTriage days are a category of BugDays specifically designed to break this vicious circle. They were discussed at the Folsom Design Summit as a way to improve our bug triaging practice. The idea is to concentrate efforts, for one day, in making our bug tracker relevant again, and start a virtuous circle of maintenance instead of of a vicious circle of abandonment.

How are we going to achieve that ? The BugTriage page on the wiki describes a set of triaging tasks that we should complete. Task one, for example, is about confirming incoming, untouched “New” bugs. The goal is to complete as many tasks as possible. Participants will gather in the #openstack-bugday IRC channel on Freenode. It starts as soon as it’s Thursday somewhere in the world, and will last as long as it’s still Thursday somewhere. We will track the results of our efforts live on pretty graphs, to quantify how well we do.

So please join us tomorrow in that long-overdue Spring cleaning effort, which will go a long way into making Folsom an awesome OpenStack release ! You can read more about the whole event here.